Finding family

by

02 November 2006

TAMMY JAMES, who works in an office of the Coventry
diocese, knew that she had a half-brother Roger in the West Indies, and had
tried several times to trace him through the internet. His name didn't come up,
she told me, but her father's did.

She knew that her father, an author from Jamaica who had died when she
was 17, had had children by three mothers; so she thought she would widen her
research. All of her father's children (including her full brother) have
Merrill as a middle name, though in her case ("I'm the only girl, so far as I
know") it is spelt Merryll.

Hunting further, she found not Roger, but another brother, Kyle, living in
east London. Both in their early 40s, they arranged to meet at Coventry
station. "It was very emotional," she said. "I recognised him immediately, not
only because he resembled my father, but by his Mohican hair cut." Kyle
Ferguson works with disabled people, and the two found they had a lot in
common. "He's a slightly hippy, gentle soul," Mrs James told me. Now they are
on a joint search for Roger Merrill Ferguson, last heard of in Florida and the
Cayman Islands.